I made the switch from an mdadm controlled RAID5 to ZFS. I am curious how others are using ZFS. I watch Ben Rockwell's talk on ZFS[1,2] and am finding that I am not using most of the advanced features it offers. It got me wondering how others are using it.

My setup: 3 HDDs in a RAIDZ1 in a dedicated box. I am not using snapshots, or other advanced features. I literally have all 3 drives mounted to /mnt/zpool and that's it.
How I use it: I boot up the NAS once or twice a week and run shell script that uses rsync to move over pics, videos, files, etc.

I guess I could create a vdev under my zpool specifically for documents, and enable snapshots for just that part of the zpool. The majority of my content is user generated images which will not change.

I use a raidz1 pool with 4x500GB 2.5" SATA HDDs as archive, is part of a always on "low power" AT5NM10T-I-ASUS headless home router, SMART notify enabled on all HDDs, they are spinned down when array is not accessed.
Compression enabled, dedup disabled.
Some folders are shared in LAN with Samba, other are used for daily incremental backup of the Gentoo root.
The zfs mount point is periodically backed up on an ext4 external USB disk.
ZFS is great for self healing, waiting to see it in action...

I use a raidz1 pool with 4x500GB 2.5" SATA HDDs as archive, is part of a always on "low power" AT5NM10T-I-ASUS headless home router, SMART notify enabled on all HDDs, they are spinned down when array is not accessed.
Compression enabled, dedup disabled.
Some folders are shared in LAN with Samba, other are used for daily incremental backup of the Gentoo root.
The zfs mount point is periodically backed up on an ext4 external USB disk.
ZFS is great for self healing, waiting to see it in action...

Can it be use to have a subvolume as raw device like LVM, to run VMs? Btrfs lacks this feature saddly.